How to share file-system resources among Linux boxes on a LAN?

Question

What do you use share file-system (and printing) resources among Linux boxes (I mean, no windows box present... ;-) over a LAN?

I mean: do you use Samba? or do you stick with NFS? or any other solution?

Answer 1

A lot depends on what you are trying to achieve and how your system (in terms of users and authentication) is set up

• NFS, easy access to files and directories on different machines, built into Linux and a lot of distributions provide a GUI to help make setup easy. But, you will have to watch out for permissions for different users and may need to have a common logon system (LDAP for example). NFS directory shares are usually mounted at system startup or auto-mounted and apply to the whole machine and all users on it.
• Samba, designed to support the Windows CIFS file sharing. Samba shares could be mounted machine wide in the same way as NFS but could also be accessed by individual users.
• rsync, if you only need the ability to synchronize files/directories between machines then rsync may be suitable for you. It will not require synchronised user accounts between machines.

And for printers

• consider what support your Linux distrubutions already has and go with what is easiest to setup and use
• IPP, internet printing protocol, may be automatically and easily supported by your distro.
• CUPS, Common Unix Printing System is another

Answer 2

I do everything over SSH and i'll always try to avoid Samba. I always had problems with it even if i would call it usable in some cases (like sharing between Windows and Linux). NFS is very stable but needs some configuration.

If you just want to mount a remote filesystem without any configuration you should use http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html! Its not as fast as NFS but surely more stable then samba.

For Printing i would suggest you http://www.masella.name/technical/sshlpr.html. It does printing over ssh.

There are some good side effects of doing things over ssh:

• its encrypted
• almost no setup if machine is running ssh
• you can do reverse mounts/prints through firewalls
• follows symlinks

Running ssh is a good idea in most cases anyway.